5of11A computer covered in mud and dust is seen labeled behind the counter of Friedman Wines after flood damage.Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

6of11A large dumpster sits outside Village Bakery as crews continue to clean up damage caused by floodwaters at The Barlow shopping plaza in Sebastopol, Calif. Friday, March 8, 2019.Photo: Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

Brooks Friedeman needed to get creative. Nearly 6 feet of water had filled the tasting room for his winery, Friedeman Wines, in Sebastopol’s Barlow complex during last week’s floods. All of the furniture was ruined. The drywall would need major repairs. Most devastating of all, Friedeman lost 95 cases of wine — about 8 percent of what he produces in a year.

How could he manage to pay his employees, Friedeman wondered, while his tasting room remained closed?

“We quickly figured out a way to do a limited run of 130 magnums as futures,” Friedeman said, for $85 apiece: wine that has not yet been bottled, promised to customers at a later date. Within 20 hours, he’d sold out of the bottles, providing him with a little bit of a cushion to help keep his staff’s paychecks coming. “It was a really impressive response from our following.”

All of Friedeman’s neighbors at the Barlow, an industrial-chic marketplace with more than 30 businesses, including breweries, art galleries and restaurants, are facing a similar plight. Located along the Laguna de Santa Rosa, the Barlow is in a 100-year floodplain, meaning that each year it has a 1 percent likelihood of flooding. Last week, that probability became a harsh reality.

In the aftermath, the Barlow’s tenant businesses are closed, but their bills — for payroll, taxes and insurance — don’t stop. Owners have had to get resourceful with fundraising. While the Barlow property itself has insurance that will cover the walls and some other built-in elements, tenants are responsible for anything they brought in, from cafe tables to refrigerators. Few had flood insurance, because it would have been prohibitively expensive given their location in a floodplain.

While Friedeman sold wine futures, at least six other food and wine businesses in the Barlow have created GoFundMe pages, asking the community for support.

A GoFundMe page for Pax Wines has raised $56,715 to help with its building repairs. Crooked Goat Brewing’s campaign has raised about $4,285 to help its employees, who have been temporarily suspended and had to file for unemployment. The Farmer’s Wife has received $11,077 so far to help with an estimated $150,000 flood damage bill, while the neighboring El Barrio taqueria has raised $4,270.

“I can’t think of a single business in there that’s not severely injured and worried,” Friedeman said.

Kendra Kolling of the Farmer’s Wife isn’t sure she will reopen her months-old cafe in the Barlow, partly from sheer exhaustion. Her family also lost their home in the 2017 Wine Country Fires two years after her husband was in a serious car accident.

The Farmer’s Wife and Sushi Kosho are among the many Barlow businesses that didn’t have flood insurance; the two also had just opened in October.

“It’s going to take a lot of energy to open the same restaurant twice in the same year,” said Sushi Kosho chef-owner Jake Rand, who owns the restaurant with his father, Barry. They’ve started a GoFundMe in part so they can retain employees until they reopen, which Rand hopes will happen next month.

“We put a lot of energy into training and a lot of energy into keeping our staff,” he said.

Even having flood insurance, however, doesn’t mean the bills are covered, as Jackie Wilson of Two Dog Night Creamery has found. She launched her liquid nitrogen ice cream business — each serving of ice cream is frozen to order — when the Barlow first opened six years ago and was able to secure affordable flood insurance for the small shop. However, hers covers only $50,000 out of an estimated $120,000 in damage, she said.

A health department inspector told Wilson last week that anything flooded that isn’t metal, one of the few materials that can be thoroughly sanitized, has to be replaced because the floodwaters were contaminated with sewage. That includes porous items like hard-plastic food storage containers, her stone countertops, since they are held up by plywood, and even tile and backsplashes, because the drywall behind it is soaked and likely contaminated.

Because she does have insurance, Wilson decided not to start a GoFundMe account. She is telling customers to ask what they can do to help to support the second location of her ice cream shop that is due to open in Windsor later this month.

Pax Wines, whose winery and tasting room are located at the western end of the Barlow, counts itself fortunate.

“No wine was affected,” said owner Pax Mahle. “Because of our location, we could see the water creeping up, and the staff was able to get all the case goods to higher ground.”

Construction on the drywall, Mahle said, will begin next week, and if things move quickly, he’s hoping he can reopen the tasting room by early April. But “right now it still looks like a disaster area,” he said.

In addition to the financial support from the GoFundMe page, friends of Pax Wines have been coming by with lunch almost every day, while others are volunteering their time to help with the cleanup.

“We’ve had 25 people in the winery every day just working their butts off, cleaning, moving debris, everything,” Mahle said. “We feel pretty fortunate.”

But community support can go only so far. Many of the Barlow’s tenant businesses are still grappling with how this scale of disaster could have happened in the first place.

“The Barlow is obviously in a floodplain. Everybody is eyes-wide-open on that,” Friedeman said. “The way everybody got comfortable with that is that the Barlow has this very elaborate flood plan system, which just wasn’t deployed.”

That flood plan, which had been approved by the city, required the Barlow to activate flood locks on each of the complex’s buildings. These barriers, theoretically, would protect against 6.5 feet of water. The plan provided for 50 employees to erect the barriers over a 12-hour period. Friedeman believes the Barlow utilized only six employees.

When he arrived at the Barlow on Wednesday morning, after the waters had stormed the complex, Friedeman had to kayak through the parking lot to reach his tasting room. The flood barrier had been raised only about 3.5 to 4 feet, Friedeman estimated. The floodwaters had easily overtaken it.

Many are now questioning whether the Barlow, which is owned by Barney Aldridge, failed to fulfill its promise to its tenants, who had trusted that the flood plan would keep their businesses safe. The Barlow’s management has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

Barlow management “indicated that they would do everything we need to get us back open,” Friedeman said. “We’re still very much hoping that the Barlow will do the right thing.”